ROLE OF A LIFETIME: Gina Gershon will portray Donatella Versace in a Lifetime movie.WireImage

THINGS are so bad for Wall Street deal makers these days they are sharing muffins for breakfast.

That’s why investment bankers, as well as a few media honchos, are desperately hoping the Federal Communications Commission will do a quick change on the rules regarding TV and cable station ownership.

The FCC under Colin Powell’s son, Michael, is now looking at the rules. A 75-day period for public comment on proposed changes is about to end, and it’s anyone’s guess how many months it will take before the FCC decides what to do about the ownership rules, if anything.

What’s in all of this for the muffin-splitters and investors?

“We expect a lot more media deals to come,” investor Mario Gabelli tells me. He specifically thinks Gannett Co. will be a buyer. And, “Clearly AOL Time Warner would like to own TV stations.”

Who’ll be bought? There aren’t many stragglers around. And big deals will be hard to swallow in this economic environment.

But there are a couple of TV station owners that are still desperately seeking a buyer.

Gabelli thinks Young Broadcasting Inc., Tribune Co., and Acme Communications will be among the broadcasters looking for a deal; Cablevision Systems in the cable industry; and Paxson Communications Corp. among the TV networks.

Pulitzer Inc., McClatchy Co. and Knight-Ridder Inc. newspaper chains also have TV and cable properties that might make them interesting to buyers.

(Hey, here’s some full disclosure. News Corp., which owns The Post, unsuccessfully bid for DirecTV, also owns a broadcast and cable news operation.)

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Speaking of cable operations that are getting unloaded. The bids for AT&T’s broadband cable operation are due tomorrow. And here’s the inside noise on the bidding.

I’m told there are expected to be at least three companies that want to merge AT&T’s cable operations into their own.

And there is at least one proposal in which an outside company would make an investment into the AT&T business, with AT&T presumably maintaining control.

Since tomorrow is the deadline, nobody has yet seen all the offers – nor, presumably have any of the bidders seen other bids. Comcast set off the process by making an unsolicited offer for the operation, which was rejected by AT&T, and it is expected to revise its offer.

The timetable: The offers will be studied next week by AT&T management and given to board members on Dec. 7. The board will meet the next day, Sat., Dec. 8.

But insiders tell me that doesn’t necessarily mean an announcement will be coming by Monday, Dec. 10. In fact, if AT&T gets lucky, the losing bidders will ask to revise their offers – which, of course, the company’s board will be forced to allow under the old “fiduciary responsibility” excuse.

“We could potentially engage in additional conversations,” says one source. “But we are trying to end this process.”

The betting right now: There’s a 50 percent chance that someone will buy AT&T broadband and merge it into its own operation; a 40 percent chance that AT&T will restructure the operation with a partner, and a 10 percent chance AT&T will fix the business on its own.